Conclusion

28 | Quality Early Learning

The expansion of ECE across LMICs presents an opportunity for countries to address learning poverty and inequality and build human capital for the future. Access to ECE has expanded dramatically across all regions and income levels in the past 20 years and is accelerating rapidly. This investment in ECE offers great promise for learning—there is no other time in life during which the brain is as sensitive to learning opportunities, with the potential for investments to yield a lifetime of benefits.

ECE leads to learning if it is of sufficient quality; the pace of ECE expansion, therefore, must be conditioned on the speed at which a minimum level of quality can be ensured. The rapid scale-up of ECE access in LMICs over the past decades has shown that quality can be harder to achieve at scale, and that quality can decrease as systems expand. For investments in ECE to yield returns, the expansion of ECE must be carried out with a strong focus on, and associated investments in, quality to foster child learning. At best, increasing access without due emphasis on quality is an inefficient use of limited resources; at worst, it can undermine children’s developmental outcomes. Thus, access to ECE should expand only to the point at which quality can be ensured.

Many countries have a unique window of opportunity now to establish quality ECE while access is still relatively low and to build systems that can ensure quality as ECE access grows. Getting this right early—both in the early years of children’s lives and in the early years of setting up an ECE system—is easier than fixing problems later. Countries’ strategies for the expansion of quality ECE should prioritize children from disadvantaged households from the start, and, as countries’ coverage rates climb higher, specialized approaches to reach the most vulnerable children who remain excluded can be introduced to better support their learning.

Countries should prioritize investments that promote child learning. Efforts to expand ECE should balance a strong focus on a minimum level of quality across different elements of ECE with a long-term plan to achieve sustainable quality early learning at scale. Countries should concurrently work on the articulation of long-term system objectives and ECE strategy, while prioritizing short-run investments to boost quality in the classroom, including improving the capacity of the existing stock of ECE workforce, adopting age-appropriate pedagogy, and ensuring safe and stimulating learning spaces. To be effective, interventions to boost child learning need not be very expensive or complex, but they need to be grounded in the knowledge of what and how young children learn.

Although countries’ experiences vary, building systems that deliver quality early learning takes time and planning, multiple investments, and many adjustments through iteration and adaptation. National planning